Plywood, choo-choo train, design and greed

Plywood

• Tom Sachs’ ode to plywood from 2012 is an artful and educational video essay on one of the modern world’s underappreciated marvels, plywood.
• The folks at Design in Practice make a solid case for plywood walls over conventional drywall. I am currently in the process of building such a wall for my home office.

Tech greed

• John Mauriello from the Design Theory channel put out an excellent piece on the mechanisms and systems that create and lead to many of the tech industry’s products of questionable value. He elaborates and offers comprehensive analysis of why we often encounter scams, grifts, and solutions looking for problems instead of genuine improvements to our lives.

Music

• Ruti with a great new song, I’LL BE YOUR FRIEND. I love the video’s understated play on a pied piper theme, and I was immediately reminded of the iconic music video for Radiohead’s Just. I’ve been listening to their short album Maybe I Got It Wrong pretty much on loop lately.
• Quentin Smirhes - I’m a Train; to quote a dear friend: “We need more of that in the world.”

Democratic work (cont.)

• Continuing on this theme, I came across an excellent and inspiring new video from Hazel Thayer.